


the common isolation of lewdness, weariness, and absurdity

by choirboyharem



Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: Age Difference, Diary/Journal, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Pining, Stalking, Twincest
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-02
Updated: 2019-10-02
Packaged: 2020-11-15 02:04:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 12
Words: 8,393
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20858423
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/choirboyharem/pseuds/choirboyharem
Summary: A socially-imperfect young man documents his struggles with a difficult home life, an unsuccessful career, self-loathing, and, most of all, true love.[Indefinite hiatus.]





	1. January 20th

**Author's Note:**

> you ever get in those moods where you read your drafts and you have an intense urge to share one of them with the world even though it's one a.m. and you have an exam in eight hours? yeah. this is kind of an experiment because i know some people really hate diary-based fic.
> 
> the title is from story of the eye by georges bataille.

B is taking college courses now. They must have started today, because his routine changed. Instead of turning down the street he usually has to turn down so he can get to the private school, he went the opposite direction and drove a little ways into the city. I don’t go to the city very often. The peopleness of it gives me anxiety attacks, but I’ll go there so I can look after B. I’d go to a volatile nuclear plant every day if B started working there. It doesn’t matter to me as long as it’s for him. 

B is absolutely brilliant, gifted in ways most people could only dream of, so I’m not surprised he graduated early. I’d had no idea. My heart aches knowing I must have missed his graduation last month because of the godforsaken trial, but it’s a little thing, really. In all honesty, I was terrified for two weeks because I thought B was sick and that was why he hadn’t gone back to the private school after Christmas break. You can only imagine my relief when I saw him finally leave the house this morning. 

I don’t know what he’s majoring in yet. I imagine it has to be business or engineering or physics or microbiology. Something like that. I’ll jump for joy if it’s engineering, obviously. Can you imagine? It would only confirm how beautifully our minds operate together. 

Him going to school in the city now is both a blessing and a curse. The blessing is not forcing myself to hide in strange places so I don’t end up becoming a registered sex offender just for minding my own business. The curse is the city itself and that I have to suffer through the horrifying noise and bustle of the local coffee shop just so I can busy myself with a drink in the courtyard as I wait for B to leave the building. 

B is going to the most expensive school in the state. It’s the singular Ivy League college we have in our city. I shouldn’t be surprised. I couldn’t be happier for him, but, sadly, I do feel a little stab of jealousy deep, deep down. But it isn’t his fault that he was born into money and, well, I wasn’t. It is what it is. He’s going to get a wonderful education and he’s going to do so much more than just inherit his father’s company. He has to. He’s more than that. 

It’s 3:47 and I finally spot him leaving, looking tired but happy. My stomach flutters like I’m in the sixth grade. I need to see him off, of course. I long to ask him how his day was, buy him coffee despite the hell of the shop, give him a gentle kiss on the cheek. Someday, maybe. Someday. 


	2. January 21st

J and I had an argument last night. It wasn’t our typical, ordinary screaming match. I have an appointment registration form open in another tab to replace my glasses and my lip still throbs in the place it was cut yesterday. My arm is scabbed over from the bloody bite I was given. 

I’m writing this while sitting on a bag of frozen peas because of what happened afterwards. 

J is a violent, unfeeling monster and an assaulter. I live in fear of the man I share an apartment with. I might have said yes. I might have opened myself up to him. But don’t think it’s because I enjoy our relationship. I don’t have sex with him because I want to. I have sex with him because I have to. It’s the only way to avoid poking the sleeping dragon. It’s disloyal to B, it makes me feel ashamed and disgusted and angry and sick, and it makes him think I love him. He thinks he exudes power over me. He’s an idiot. 

Every time I kiss him, touch him, spread my thighs, lower my head between his legs, I have to think about B and how sorry I am, repeating it like a Hail Mary. I am unclean and unworthy. B is perfect, innocent and pretty, bathed in milk and sugar, and I am a degenerate. All because of J. The man is vile and manipulative, obnoxious and mean and rude, physically abusive, hopelessly cruel. We only share the same home because I couldn’t survive on the library’s meager paychecks. One day, he’s going to do something to hurt himself or get himself killed and I’ll collect his life insurance. And then I will be free. 


	3. January 22nd

I’m writing with shaking fingers, my body limp and sated because of my Polaroid pictures. I’m in a pocket of my own heaven. After two years of being irrevocably in love with B, willing to give my life for him if it would only mean his eternal happiness, I’ve finally gotten to share a moment of intimacy with him. 

B has rearranged his bedroom so he can make room for a new corkboard, presumably for notes, reminders, test dates, and other school-related goings-on. His floor mirror is pushed against another wall and, rather than seeing nothing but his shoulders and head while he dresses and undresses, cut off primarily by a chest of drawers, I get to see him from his head to his toes. And he’s beautiful. 

B is tall for his age and still growing. He’s almost as tall as I am. He’s pale and pink and his skin is flawless, every single inch of it, looking smooth to the touch. You don’t understand how badly I want to kiss it. I want to treat him like the prince he is. I want to wrap him in silk and feel his chest shudder underneath my lips, his fingernails digging into my back. I want to be inside him and be gentle with him, moving my hips against him and swallowing his moans. I’ll bite him, but carefully, just enough to leave myself behind and mark him as my own. I don’t want to hurt him. I want him to feel as though somebody loves him, now and forever. 

I have to admit, it was difficult for me to control myself on the ledge. I had to press a hand against myself so it wouldn’t ache so terribly. I went twenty miles over the speed limit getting home, the pictures I took bringing themselves to life on the front seat of my car. Fortunately, B didn’t seem to hear the shutter of the camera before I left. 

I locked myself in my bedroom and took my clothes off faster than I ever have in my life. With one hand dripping slick and the photo of the delicate slope of B’s back and ass in the other, tears jumped to my eyes as I touched myself. It’s never felt so good before. My thumb left an indentation in the photograph as I moved because I was too overcome with the idea of drawing my fingers over his gorgeous frame, kissing the back of his slender neck and touching him, listening to him cry and beg for more, for me to stop teasing. He wants me to fuck him. 

I haven’t ever had an orgasm that’s made me see stars before. Fascinating. I had to spend five minutes just recovering from it, and now, here I am, so deep in bliss I feel like laughing. 

B, tonight was very special. I know you have to feel it, too. 


	4. January 23rd

Sunday is my least favorite day of the week. I always have to work an open-to-close shift and I’m not able to see B because B is usually out with his parents on Sunday nights. Sometimes, if I’m lucky, I’m able to drive past the manor and spot B near the front door with a bright smile, dressed to the nines like he belongs at a royal ball. It’s a bit too risky, though. I already have to deal with his butler trailing after him whenever the Mister and Missus aren't around. The less opportunities I give them, the better off I’ll be. 

Have I ever talked about how we first met? B and I? Not in this book I haven't. I dream about that day often, but I can rarely talk about it. Of course I've never mentioned B to J. Can you imagine the havoc J would wreak in that boy's world? I must protect him if no one else will. 

We met on April 19th, two springtimes ago, at 4:32 P.M. B was already a sophomore, bright and intelligent as ever. He was checking out _Life's Engines,_ so you can only imagine my excitement. I've always been more drawn to rudimentary, nonhuman science, bare-bones physics, creating structure, fountains of knowledge and resources, sorts of things like that, but I have a somewhat intimate knowledge of microbiology. (If my financial situation allowed it, I would go back to school to pursue at least a minor in it.) _Life's Engines_ is one of my favorite reads and seeing it in B's hands made me ecstatic.

Perhaps it was the moment our fingers touched that made _Life's Engines_ that much more important to me. The book no longer belongs to Falkowski, but to B, who I think of every time I reread a passage in it. I had been editing the card catalog at the front desk, doing busy work and barely keeping myself afloat even after three cups of coffee, when I heard his voice for the very first time. 

"Excuse me." It was soft but sure and it sounded like a melody. I don't know what drew me in from the very first second I heard B speak to me, but something about his voice made my breath catch before it got a chance to leave my lungs. I remember looking up at him at the same time my hand dove up to fiddle with my glasses and scratch my nose, a nervous tick I know I could subdue if I tried, but I've never bothered before or since. 

B's eyes are green, deep and dark, far darker than my own. His hair is always gelled to perfection and I have such an urge to reach out and destroy how neat it looks. His nose is an elegant slope and his mouth is pink, his lips endlessly falling into a pout. His eyebrows quirk like he's always curious. He looked almost the same that day that he does now, except his face hadn't lost its roundness, baby fat still clinging to soft cheeks, his voice not quite as deep and even. He wore a school uniform I hadn't recognized at the time, but would eventually come to know as an exact replica of the one that hides underneath the floorboard in my bedroom. That's a secret. The shoebox and the shopping bag are tiny secrets, things I have to keep hidden away like the man with the tell-tale heart. 

I fell in love with him before he could even say another word. I will never understand how the human heart performs or the chemicals responsible for it, but in that one spare second, everything seemed to click into place and I didn't know my own faulty wiring or compulsion to do away with myself. All I knew was this boy, this beautiful, gentle-looking boy with the mouth of a cherry-popping pinup girl and eyes that blinked wide and innocent, and that I was in love with him without even knowing his name. 

I was nervous. I tend not to be nervous around patrons anymore, containing the irritating awkwardness that comes with attempting to act like a person in modern society because I've managed the place for so long, but B made me more nervous than I had ever been before. I generally don't experience romantic or sexual attraction because I don't see the point in it (and J doesn't count, J is different, J is a manipulative freak and a lunatic and that's his fault), but B. . . It was like feeling myself fill up with a bizarre blend of cotton and lead and hot wax that settled in my stomach and rushed to my brain at the same time. I believe my knees almost gave out. I could kill myself for just staring at him, unable to speak, unable to ask him what his name was. If I had been J, I would've asked him if it had hurt when he fell down from Heaven and if that didn't hurt bad enough, I could make it hurt worse. 

"I'd like to check this out." He handed the book over the counter and he touched me. His fingers brushed mine, just for a second, barely long enough for me to notice. My heart almost escaped my ribcage. 

I nearly dropped _Life's Engines_ while running the barcode through the scanner. Finally, I spoke, but my voice didn't seem like my own. It was at a pitch I didn't recognize. "I'll need the name for your card."_ I'll need you. I'll need you behind this desk, underneath me—_

He told me his name and it was an instantaneous imprint on my memory. I recognized the surname as one of the overrich, privileged families that kept the city afloat. B is a prince, a future patriarch. It's why dignity and grace come naturally to him. 

His information appeared on the screen in front of me. I rang the book through, my mouth still full of cobwebs, and printed his receipt. His fingers nearly touched mine a second time before the book and paper left my hands.

"Have a good day," I remember saying even as I felt like sinking into the floor. I'd said it with my stutter, something more like "h-have a g-good day". I hadn't stuttered for years. It's another tick that's worn off with time, something J and I had both lived with as children. B had reduced me to a child. 

"You as well, thank you." B had given me a smile, polite and unobservant of my absurdities. He'd left too quickly and I know I stared after him, my hands shaking. 

That was the beginning of our love story, B. What did you feel that day? Did you think of me after you left? Did you notice the flush on my skin, the hitch in my voice, the trembling in my fingers? You did that to me. You took my heart from me that afternoon. I've let you keep it. You can keep it until your breath doesn't come so easily anymore. You can keep it when your fingers loosen around it from loss of nerve as your body grows cold in your bed and I'll watch after you, withered as I am, unable to pass without seeing you through to your very last moments. 

If only I'd said something to you that day in the library. My name. Another book recommendation after you finished _Life's Engines._ A comment about the weather. Anything that would've kept you close to me for just a minute longer. 

Someday, I'll have the courage to walk up to you and say, "I think I recognize you from the library I manage outside the city. This is my name, this is my life, and they belong to you."


	5. January 24th

J has a new job. The ignoramus got himself fired from his previous project for assault a month or so ago, just before Christmas, but if you know the right like-minded scum, you can make something like that disappear with the snap of one's fingers. Rather than just voice acting, he's in a real television show now. He's apparently playing a major character and he can't stop gloating about it. It's making me twitch and drink more. It's going to be a strange, uncanny sort of thing to see him on a TV screen, doing what he promised/threatened to do since we were children. As pathetic as it is, it makes me bitter enough for me to taste it. Sure, if you set your sights on not being something more than a local performer who constantly sucks his own cock, it's easy to fulfill all your dreams. Some people can work for their Master's for six years after graduating from high school far earlier than his peers and search everywhere for work, but be unable to find it because he refuses to sell himself cheap. All he needs is funding. The model in his bedroom is gathering dust and he feels somewhat like killing himself. 

But he can't, because he got time-and-a-half on his last paycheck and he can afford to buy more alcohol. 

I'm writing under the dim glow of the bedside table in J's room. I'm compulsive and drowning, my head barely keeping itself in place because I am drunk and full to the brim with self-loathing and exhaustion. J is asleep. He has been for two hours now and it is now 3:08 A.M. and I cannot follow him, as badly as I want to. He's warm and I feel as though I need that. 

B, I'm sorry about what I do to you. My body aches for you, so badly it feels like I've rubbed myself raw, each and every layer of skin burning, so I have to let J do what he will with me. I couldn't visit you tonight because the shame is eating me whole, swallowing me down. I'm a weak man. J calls me a coward. Maybe he's right, as begrudgingly as I say that.

You couldn't ever see the horror in this man while he sleeps. J's hair is a little longer than mine, a little fluffier, not cut very well. It looks like a rat's nest. He doesn't have the permanent indentation in his nose from a pair of prescription glasses. The differences. He's a kind, lovely soul if you just admire his features and physique, long and lithe, his skin dusted with faded freckles. Like mine. In sleep, he looks so, so normal and, somehow, horrifyingly, I almost want him to be the one I ache for. Just so things would be easier. (Which makes me laugh. Of course everything about my life would be so deeply absurd that my relationship with J would be easier to navigate in the broader sense of America's social system.)

But love isn't easy. It's not meant to be. Love can test a man's faith or lead him to it. I never knew loving you would be as hard for me as it is, but it's all going to be worth it someday, B. 

I can't wait to see you tomorrow. I love you, even though I'll fall asleep in J's bed. You'll be the one I dream about.


	6. January 25th

B has a friend. 

It's a girl. 

. . .

You see, one of the reasons why B and I make so much sense together is because B does not have friends. Not really. No friends he’s kept in contact with through the past few years. I don’t like to make friends, either. 

Him befriending this girl does not make any sense at all. 

The girl goes to his school, because they left the building together. They sat in the courtyard and had a discussion that made B laugh more than once, something I rarely get to see, so at least that was something. But why are you talking to her, B? Is she really that smart? For some reason, I doubt it. 

I got closer to B today than I ever have before in public for the sake of discovering the girl's intentions. I bent down low over a book, hiding behind my cold brew in the courtyard, my fingers mangling a slip of paper to try and keep myself from picking at my own hands. I’m lucky the weather is so unseasonably gracious this winter. My heart pounded from being so close to him again and hearing his voice. I was three tables away, still too afraid to speak up. It was like torture. 

Her voice is annoying. The girl’s. Too dismissive and rude and overly sure of herself. I’m now calling her S. S has an irritating complex in which she clearly likes B, but acts as though she doesn’t by being unkind and insulting towards him. He doesn’t seem to mind or understand, though, because he’s too sweet for his own good. He clearly isn’t into her act, even if he can’t see through it. He’ll wise up to it soon enough.

Through S’s ridiculous and lengthy interrogation of B, I’ve at least gotten to learn a thing or two I didn’t know before. He’s pursuing a degree in international business (I was very close in my earlier guess), he couldn't be happier to be out of high school, and he’s always kept himself too busy with books and puzzles and investment in his parents’ company to ever think about girls much at all. 

Behind my book, my eyes danced. B, how often do you think about men? I wanted to ask. It was the sort of thing I had always told my mother whenever she asked me why I hadn’t found a girlfriend yet if I was so charming and well-read. I wasn’t charming, unfortunately, even if I was well-read, because that was a trait J seemed to have stolen from me at some point, but it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. I was too busy with books and puzzles as well, with my additional interest being cartography and mazes and blueprints, but any time I spent away from that was devoted to boys. Always in the abstract, however. The idea of sex and touching and kissing and hurting and getting spit on. Never a face, just the act. (Isn't it strange to imagine how much I love disgusting sex but have never wanted to experience it in the real world? What creates the disconnect?)

I wonder what B thinks about. Does he think about hands wrapped around his throat? Does he think of a switchblade cutting into his thigh? Does he think of being hit and saying thank you, do it again?

She laughed at B and called him a nerd after he spoke up about, essentially, not liking girls. B looked embarrassed. 

I’ve decided I really do not like S very much at all.


	7. January 26th

It was agony, but I was forced to break away from B for the past several hours to discover what I could about S. I have to understand her and her motivations. I’m not going to leave B in the hands of a potential psychopath. Psychopaths look like everyone’s next-door neighbor. She could be a psychopath and I’m only taking precautions.

S left B in the courtyard to attend to her work inside the school, she mentioned, being rude again. My heart tugged in two directions on whether to follow her or look after B, but I had to know the intentions of this girl.

S is not a student. She’s a street rat. She works in the cafeteria and she lives in a gutter. I want to laugh, but the situation is too miserable. She must be chasing B for his money, desperate to get her hands on it and pull herself off the grimy curb her body rots on every night. She’s trash.

I‘m writing at my desk at eleven in the morning, the dreariest time of the day. Every once in a while, a mother with an obnoxious, preschool-aged child or an elderly person looking for coffee and newspapers will come in on late weekday mornings, but for the most part, I never have interruptions here. I’m so very grateful for it right now. I am ashamed to admit it, but, yes, I am gleeful about last night’s discovery. S is no competition. B will see her for what she is: a gold-digging slut.

J is calling me, but I’ve warned him never to call me when I’m at work. My schedule is on the fridge. He should know it by now. He can go pester someone else.


	8. January 27th

It’s 4:32 A.M. and my head aches, crying for the sedation of the Advil that hasn’t settled yet. 

J knows I hate parties. He knows I refuse to go to them on the very rare occasions that I am invited. He knows I hate people and being around them and talking to them and interacting with them. He knows about my anxiety. And he truly couldn’t care less. 

J told his coworkers that he was going to host a party at our home to celebrate the successful kick start of filming their show. He claims he tried to call me to ask for permission, but he absolutely knew I was at work. By the time I arrived home, I nearly had a crippling attack from the noise that escaped from the open windows.

Fighting through the parade of idiots was terrifying, but I was so upset that it couldn’t hold a candle to everything else I was feeling. Pushing a faceless girl away and punching J in the jaw before answering his hello was satisfying enough as a prize, even if it made my knuckles ache. I’m not nearly as much of a brute as he.

We had a rather humiliating altercation that I have to say was all my fault, but, in the spirit of our dissatisfactory childhood, he started it. He was drunk, something that surprised me, because he says drunkards remind him of our mother and they disgust him. He babbled on about how I supposedly never want to spend time with him unless I’m taking advantage of him, that I make him lonely, that he loves me, spewing complete and utter nonsense. I had no idea what he wanted or what point he was trying to make, but he wouldn’t let me get a word in edgewise. I shouted at him for being so inconsiderate and disingenuous because I was too wound up to notice any staring. 

He strangled me. I remember his cup hitting the floor and his hands diving for my neck. He knocked me to the floor and tried to choke me out like a maniacal, coke-binging animal and my glasses skittered away. It wasn’t all too different from many of our other fights, but this one was too public. It was genuinely stupid. We acted like children. I kicked him and threw him off and I began to hit him the way I rarely do: square in the nose, trying to break it. Trying to sink my fist into eye and burst it. Trying to crack his shining teeth so he wouldn’t want to smile so much. I was overcome with violence, rage spilling out of me from months of J pushing and pushing and pushing. I felt like I wanted to kill him. And I might have if hadn’t been dragged away from him. 

A woman yelled at me and asked what my problem was. For some horrible reason I can’t seem to describe, it was too much for me. I scratched her. I didn’t even know her. I scratched her and I hit her and I bit her. It was a ghastly scene, real horror show. And I scratched and shouted at the man who tried to subdue me in turn. I was clawed and frothing, screaming in barely-functioning fragments, demanding they all leave. J wheezed with a streaming nose and a swollen eye, staring up at me. 

The last thing I saw before the room went black was the end of the bottle out of the corner of my eye.

I’ve been walking a clumsy balance between asleep and awake for a few hours now. At least five. Every time I try to sleep, the pounding gets worse. My temple is cut open and blood had dried in threads across my face when I woke up the first time. 

J was fast asleep when I first discovered him, sprawled out on the couch, snoring and most likely not sober, but clean of blood. The living room was in complete disarray and I still felt sickening anger even through the twisting drill of a headache. 

There was a slip of paper tucked into the back of J‘s pants. I pulled it out. 

It was somebody’s phone number. I dropped it in the garbage disposal and watched the scraps snowstorm. 

The Advil is, at last, soothing my head. I’m praying I don’t wake up again for hours. 

**January 27th (Again)**

I was ten minutes late for work today and I didn’t even get to see B before he went to school. I feel terrible about it. It’s been over a day since I last saw him. He could be hurt. He could be sick. He could be making incredibly poor decisions that will ruin his life. He could be failing a class (which I highly doubt, but you never know). 

I feel like I have a hangover, but it’s really more lack of sleep and the lingering headache. At least I’m not nauseous. I shelved returns and reorganized the magazine rack to keep myself busy and tried to sketch B while using the Polaroids I keep in this book. I have two. One is of his lovely profile and the other is a very tasteful, half-nude image of him in bed, surrounded by velvet and silk. I can only imagine the luxury of reclining among such richness surrounding naked skin with B tucked underneath my arm, his chest resting against my own. His skin is still pink and flushed and my hand is in his hair, stroking his soft, dark curls. We have a quiet discussion about our devotion to one another and theories about the inevitable destruction of the universe. I tilt his head up and kiss him, slow and deep, but he’s needier than I am, wanting more. He touches me and I feel fire rekindling, so I roll him onto his back and hitch his leg up, pushing his hips at an angle so we can feel each other. We make love for hours, overjoyed that, at long last, we have each other to keep until time stops. 

Wait a moment, J can't be here. He doesn’t ever come to the library. I hope he doesn't want to bomb it. I don't have the time or energy to deal with it. 

**January 27th (Yet Again)**

J brought me coffee when he came in earlier today and told me he apologized for the party, which I took with a grain of salt. He doesn't care whether or not I forgive him whenever he apologizes for anything, but he can pat himself on the back and feel like a good brother for doing it. The fact that I haven't forgiven him only means that I am a bad person. He thinks he's so tricky, doesn't he. He thinks he's a puzzle, when, in actuality, it's only impossible to understand his motivations if you're a drooling moron trying desperately to shove a square peg in a round hole. 

He rambled after he'd handed me my coffee (at the very least, he'd gotten it right: black, two sugars, but I still don't forgive him) and I couldn't help but focus on his swollen, purple eyes and the hand-stitched cut on his forehead and dark red split on his lip. It gave me a strange sort of thrill that I couldn't place. He noticed my staring and he seemed to glow when he told me he was proud of me for what I did last night. 

I narrowed my eyes and asked him why, because this had to have been some kind of power play, something perverted, something wrong, whatever whatever whatever. J shrugged and told me I was finally 'living up to my potential', and it was then I realized it was just about his theory that I'm as mentally unstable as he is. You should hear him when he really gets going. He truly believes I'm going to snap someday and burn down an elementary school or murder a litter of puppies just because it'll fuel his ego and absurdist conspiracy theories. 

I've always had trouble balancing my temper with my introverted nature, but I usually overcome it. Very, very rarely, it will get the better of me. The party was an extremely rare happenstance. I am not J. I will never be J. At least I have the gall to be ashamed of the horror I could be capable of. The difference between the two of us is that I can manage to act like somewhat of a human being. I know I'm not normal, but I'm not an evil, rotting ragdoll corpse of a man propping himself up with the reactions of others from seeking so much attention. I like to think of it as an everyday pilot versus a kamikaze: as a pilot, you have the capability to drive the plane into the ocean or lead it into a nosedive and feel it crush hundreds of feet of asphalt, but you have a general duty to society to not give into your compulsions and end the lives of hundreds. But if you have nothing to lose and your head is full to the brim with terror and the romanticization of violence, what's stopping you? The plane goes down and you're at peace with that, regardless of who's traveling with you, because it doesn't matter. 

Anyway, J talked me into coming with him during my break and, B, of course, I'm sorry, but we did "fool around", in J's words. I only did it so I wouldn't feel quite so horribly pent-up when coming to see you later. It was cold outside, colder than it has been lately, so I could see my breath whenever my mouth fell open and I could feel how frigid the brick was against my back as he got on his knees for me. He was more generous than he usually is. It was possible there was, in fact, a little more to his apology than he'd let on. I still didn't forgive him, but it might have. . . softened me somewhat. 

I let him kiss me. That was his forgiveness. Especially because I could still taste myself on him, which, I have to say, isn't a taste I've ever really enjoyed. 


	9. January 28th

S is still hovering around B like a lovesick child. She must have talked him into playing games with her, because this afternoon, he took her to a bookstore I frequent myself during B's longer classes so I can escape the cold. I don't understand why he tolerates her, because all she does is bully him into submission. She doesn't seem to have any ounce of respect for him. She doesn't care about him or who he is or how his mind works. It's sickening, really. How can he be friends with her!? I feel like pulling my hair out. B, I know you have trouble making friends because it's difficult for others to match your pace and you'd rather work alone, but there's no reason to abandon that so you can entertain the thoughts of a ugly trash girl. Truth be told, she's a bitch and that's the kindest thing I can think to call her.

I'm somewhat irritated with myself that I've let her take up so much paper in this book as it is. That's not the most important thing that happened today. As I tried to keep an eye on B, I kept myself busy when necessary with _L'histoire de l'œil._ Probably not the best novel to let others see me read in public, but I'd had them send out for a first edition a few weeks prior and it arrived today.

I accidentally brushed his arm when I got too absorbed and he passed me on his way to the front counter while S browsed on her own.

The headrush was something I can't even describe. I felt as though I was going to vomit. He spoke to me and I could barely stand on my own two feet.

"Sorry, excuse me—" B paused and looked at me. I know I must have looked like a deer caught in headlights. My stomach churned and my hands were clammy. I felt cold, shivering fear roll down the length of my spine. I felt as though I had been standing there for ages, possibly years, watching B scrutinize me, as though he could read my thoughts.

"You work at the library, right?" B asked, and the relief gave me rickets. I almost damaged the pages of the book from gripping it so tightly and I nodded at him. There was a War-and-Peace-length wealth of words I needed and wanted to say, but I couldn't say anything.

He seemed confused by my resolute silence, but, as sweet and gracious as the boy is, he smiled anyway, held out his hand, and told me his name. The name I've been obsessed with for longer than the length of some modern marriages.

I told him mine and shook his hand, drowning in humiliation from how shaky and damp my own was. What else do you do when your soulmate, the boy you've been in love with for months and months, the boy you've seen naked and open and vulnerable, introduces himself to you and doesn't know the memories the two of you have shared?

"I'll let you get back to your book, J, but it was nice to be formally introduced."

And I let him slip away.

He said my name.

I had to leave the shop immediately and go back home so I could strip myself and think of my name on his lips. Gripping a pair of his silken boxer shorts around myself, my eyes watering in pleasure as I stared blurrily at my Polaroids, I thought of him saying my name like a chant, his fingernails scraping down my back as he writhed underneath my body, practically shouting as he came, spilling all over both our stomachs.

Why bother thinking about S at all when B said my name today and touched me for the first time in two years? I need to reevaluate my priorities. Shame on me.

I couldn't be happier that B said my name, I feel as though I'm floating on air, but it does make it somewhat more frightening that he could recognize me while I'm looking out for him. I'll have to be more careful.


	10. January 29th

B's butler rearranged his furniture again to make room for a new dresser, so now I rather feel like killing the butler. His lower half is cut off again. At the very least, I can still see B while he sleeps. 

One night, three months ago, I stayed up until the birds began to sing and the skies began to turn a softer blue, watching B sleep. I was cold, shivering in my jacket, my fingers numb in my pocket and on the bricks of the manor, but it was worth it. I learned B sometimes talks in his sleep. It's little more than nonsense, but it's so adorable it makes me want to giggle. It's soft little mumbles as he furrows his brow, turning over in bed. Nothing I've ever seen has been more endearing. I wanted to climb inside and kiss him awake, watching his eyelids flutter, and see his surprise and happiness that I came to see him. 

I've climbed inside four or five times before. Just to understand the layout of his bedroom. Make a mental note of his likes and dislikes. See what sorts of clothes he chooses to wear. What materials they're made of. What kinds of product he puts in his hair. What he smells like. 

The first time I did it, it was just after his fifteenth birthday and I had finally become brave enough to explore the layout of the room. As weak and human as I am, I dove for B's hamper almost immediately and came away with pieces of his uniform that I still have with me at home. I took a shirt that smelled like him. I took his underwear, all little things I intended to return, but the only thing that made its way back to the manor was the shirt. 

I did some sketches of the layout, committing it to memory, mapping out what B kept in his drawers, his closet, his desk, anything else that could hold secrets or surprises. It had been three months since we first met and I was still falling in love with him. Seeing the things he kept, wore, and did with himself didn't help; he drew me in the more I uncovered about him. You know how much I adore puzzles. 

B was a puzzle and so very unlike his peers. I had been the same way. Ever since preschool, I had always been picked last for everything, had always eaten lunch alone, had always kept too much to myself. It fascinates me, because B had every opportunity to be a snob among his classmates and become popular, because he was young, pretty, and had endless wealth. He never cared to stand out among them as the best of the best. He was kind and pure and honest. He still is, of course, but even as a schoolboy, he was golden. 

(It sounds perverted to describe him as a schoolboy, doesn’t he? I guess I’m somewhat of a pervert. It’s because of J. I believe it runs in the family.)

Anyway, his room is different now. I’m going to do another inventory check next Tuesday during his afternoon class. 


	11. January 30th

J has several friends. I don't have many of my own, as I've said, but J does. I don't know if they're quite friends per say, rather than just being acquaintances that laugh at J's stupid jokes and enable his casual sexual harassment and minor fits of violence, but he still spends time with them and invites them over to our house and I hate every single one of them. 

One of them I'm positive is a convicted sex pest, another is a frightening, socially-inept freak who refuses to grow out of his goth phase, another is a flamboyant, pretentious moron who everyone knows is in the pocket of the local police captain, another is a small-time arsonist, and yet another is a self-proclaimed 'scientist' who I assume killed his wife. The days he has any of them over are the days I either escape as soon as I can to work or I lock myself in my bedroom. I know they laugh at me and call me a shut-in, they make fun of me, they try to get me to come out—I'm not going to fall for it. I’m not J’s party trick. (We’re not fifteen anymore.)

They’re all drinking outside my room right now. I feel my fingers twitch and my throat burn from the aftereffects of the fallout from J’s last get-together. The healing cut and bruise on the side of my head throbs. 

I am not a violent person. 

I am not. 

Violent thoughts forcing one’s hand, turning thought crime into physical crime in the blink of an eye, as if it were a direct cause-and-effect, is such a Catholic way of thinking. Even after spending my teenage and adult years distancing myself from the Church and God Himself, I still feel the turmoil and indoctrination digging their fingernails into my shoulders, trying to force me into repentance, as if I can be cleansed. As if I will not become a petty criminal or a murderer or a rapist, because the intrusive thoughts I have will leave my empty mind. As if my mind works my body like a marionette and free will is not the bridge between thought and action. 

I am not a violent person because I choose not to be. I have the capability. 

I have the capability to leave my room and cut off J’s loud, obnoxious voice at the source, ripping his vocal chords out of his throat. 

But I don’t. I stay in my room, curled over this book, the soft glow of the bedside table casting yellow shadow over me and the pages I scribble on. Because I am not a violent person. 

The only thing that can force my hand is J. I don’t need to repent; I need J to end his own life before I end his and my own for both our sakes. 

I can hear the odd, oily, tilted voice of J’s convicted sex pest friend. It makes me sick to listen to him because all I can imagine is him singing to somebody’s little blonde Wendy Moira Angela Darling, luring her into his arms with candy outside a playground in that voice. I’m turning on Bach so I can get a moment of peace. 

It’s 11:31 P.M. and B has been asleep for two hours now. An eight-A.M. class apparently began today and he collapsed into bed an hour and a half earlier than usual, asleep before his head hit the pillow. He doesn’t snore very often, but he did tonight. It was soft and endearing, his mouth open and his hair a rumpled mass of loose curls and waves. I’m smiling just thinking about it. The music clouding and masking the voices of J and his friends with a picture of B in my mind is enough to bliss me out so thoroughly that I could die in the feeling of it. 

I need to maintain this until I’m relaxed enough to pass out. In the truly pathetic art of sleeping alone in a twin-sized bed, I’ll curl around myself, pressing my lips against B’s naked back in another creased Polaroid. 

At least J is busy enough to let me masturbate in the privacy of my own bedroom tonight. Little things. Little things in life. 


	12. January 31st

I’ve been rereading  _ Lolita  _ again. 

I remember it having a fairly damaging effect on me the first time I read it. The problem with suffering from both paranoia and trauma born from repeated accounts of sexual deviancy is worrying about how much you truly identify with distasteful characters and their distasteful actions. It sent me into a bit of a spiral of self-doubt and misery, wondering if I was the homosexual counterpart of Humbert Humbert, lusting after faunlets instead of nympthets, wanting to touch young boys. In the most twisted, confusing way, it made me hate any and all children, wanting to keep far away from them with the fear that I would someday snap and commit a heinous, unforgivable act. That lingers. I can’t listen to a child crying in public without wanting to grind my teeth and dig my fingernails into my palms. 

I am not attracted to young boys, that much I discovered. I’m rarely even attracted to grown men. I’m rarely attracted to anyone. 

I am attracted to B. This began when he was young and, as I let my tongue slip a few days ago, just a schoolboy, really. It wasn’t simply because he was a boy. This is where Humbert and I differ, and where I can breathe a sigh of relief: Humbert lusted after any girl who fell in line with his description of a perfect female child. Any girl he deigned to call a nymphet, little she-demons who tempted him with small, smooth bodies and doe eyes and milky limbs, would become yet another one of his many fantasies. He claimed to love his Lolita, little Dolores Haze, but the more he discovered about her personality, the more disgusted and frustrated he was with her. He began to detest her the more temperamental and angry and traumatized she became. He wanted to possess her. She was no different from any other little girl he wanted to kidnap and rape. She was an object, a toy that he ended up breaking. 

My love for B does not compare, because, in the heart of hearts, at the very core of this connection I have with him, it is  _ love _ . I would give my life for this boy. I would protect him, never touch him if he never wished me to, kiss his fluttering eyelids and brush away his tears when he cried, cradle him, whisper in his ear, keep him as my own but let him leave if he needed to. I have never loved another boy in such a way. I don’t love boys, I love B. I love B. 

_ I love B _ . 

When I think of dark hair and deep eyes, the color of a foggy, mossy, wet summer morning in the European countryside, I think of B. When I think of pale, pink skin and slender limbs, gentle as a rabbit, I think of B. When I think of a dimpled, kind smile and the softest, richest fabrics money can buy, I think of B. I see him in everything, but in anyone else, I see nothing. No boy can, has, or ever will make me feel the way he has. I cannot compare him to any other boy I have ever met, because he is unlike anyone else I have ever met. 

Take that, Humbert, you sick, weak-willed, rotting pervert. Did you ever love your Lolita if you spent your life trying to see copies of her in other girls? You thought a pale imitation could solve your problems even for a moment? As much as you continued to remind me how much you did, in fact, possess a soul, I doubt its validity. Your “love” was a fetish. You were a sham and I’m quite glad you’re dead. 

I recognize how fruitless it is to rave like a lunatic over a fictional character, but the indignation I still feel is all too real, especially because I am now halfway through this novel. I know how the book ends, but just out of pure pettiness I want to transport myself into the world of  _ Lolita  _ and have him arrested for not only raping a child, but for making a mockery of true love and forbidden desires. 

Rotting pervert. 


End file.
